Invisible Talagent "Windows" in Mission Control on Reboot?

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Invisible Talagent "Windows" in Mission Control on Reboot?

Whenever I reboot recently, I've noticed that I have a lot of invisible Talagent windows taking up space in Mission Control. There's no content shown and the only way that I can see them is if I mouse around on the screen and the name will come up. They seem harmless aside from the fact that they're taking up space in the display, forcing other windows to look smaller.

Clicking on them always brings up a Safari window, though usually always the same window on the desktop. (To be fair, I have an ungodly number of Safari windows open, so if you're randomly picking a window to change to, there's a very good chance it'll be a Safari window.)

I "fix" the problem by killing the /System/Library/CoreServices/talagent process, but I worry that a) I might be killing a useful function and b) I'm only fixing a symptom of a bigger problem. Anyone else see this problem or have a better understanding of what's causing this?

Thanks,

Pete

MacBook Pro with Touch Bar

Posted on Mar 11, 2022 9:29 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 11, 2022 4:06 PM in response to Pete Toscano

Pete Toscano wrote:

Whenever I reboot recently, I've noticed that I have a lot of invisible Talagent windows taking up space in Mission Control. There's no content shown and the only way that I can see them is if I mouse around on the screen and the name will come up. They seem harmless aside from the fact that they're taking up space in the display, forcing other windows to look smaller.

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/43bd5264-2ff5-4663-a136-c2bedbab4ed4

Clicking on them always brings up a Safari window, though usually always the same window on the desktop. (To be fair, I have an ungodly number of Safari windows open, so if you're randomly picking a window to change to, there's a very good chance it'll be a Safari window.)

I "fix" the problem by killing the /System/Library/CoreServices/talagent process, but I worry that a) I might be killing a useful function and b) I'm only fixing a symptom of a bigger problem. Anyone else see this problem or have a better understanding of what's causing this?

Thanks,

Pete

Seems it could be a bug in how multiple windows persist in Safari...

You can read more from the Terminal.app, copy and paste:

 man  talagent

You can file a bug report, directly with the Product Team: Feedback - Safari - Apple

Just a thought—

If this is the exposé feature, see and/or try increasing the number of recent items:

>System Preferences>General>Recent items

Mission Control 4 finger swipe up

Exposé four finger swipe down

Use Mission Control on your Mac - Apple Support

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Answer 2

Pete Toscano Author

Level 1

13 points

Mar 15, 2022 2:46 PM in response to leroydouglas

Thank you, leroydouglas. I read the man page previously, but I don't know enough about macOS app development to know what to do with the Transparent App Lifecycle features exposed by running talagent from the command line. I did run it with the -casinfo option. It displayed a bunch of my running app bundles and associated info, but nothing that I knew what to do with. There were a few "(null)" bundles listed, but the number didn't correspond to the number of blank Talagent windows displayed in Mission Control.

I tried changing the recent items as suggested, but that didn't seem to affect anything related to the blank Talagent windows.

FWIW, they're still there when updating to Monterey 12.3.

I do like your theory that this is tied to Safari. With this reboot, I checked for Talagent windows on all desktops. Only the desktops with Safari windows on them had the Talagent windows on them. Not sure if this is cause or correlation, but it's an interesting idea. I'm trying to play around with Mission Control and Safari windows to see if there's any way to tame this.

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Answer 3

Mar 24, 2022 5:16 AM in response to Pete Toscano

How did you perform the process? Can you please show how you killed /System/Library/CoreServices/talagent? I have that issue too.

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Invisible Talagent "Windows" in Mission Control on Reboot?

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